Category: Games

By Laura Prudom

This review contains spoilers for Marvel’s Jessica Jones Season 2, episode 5, titled “The Octopus.” To see where we left off, check out our review of Season 2, episode 4 and follow along with our full season binge here.

Jessica might think that she and super-powered Janet McTeer are the only monsters in town, but she should probably be keeping a closer eye on both Trish and Jeri, who are reacting to their growing sense of helplessness by taking increasingly dangerous risks.

Jeri has offered to shelter Inez Green from the mystery killer not out of the goodness of her heart (duh), but because she’s curious about IGH’s gene-editing therapy, which she’s clearly hoping might offer a cure for her ALS. As far as reckless decisions go, it’s probably not even the most questionable one Jeri has made over the past two seasons, but she’s smart enough to know, even without being privy to all the specifics of Jessica’s case, that it’s a dubious plan, otherwise she wouldn’t have hidden it from Jess.

And Trish might insist that she wants to be Griffin rather than be with him, but she’s behaving a lot more like Will Simpson this season, rebounding from her aborted engagement by juicing herself back up with her ex’s performance-enhancing inhaler, because a “recovering” addict is still an addict.

On the plus: Griffin is a good guy! His sleuthing around on Trish’s computer was all because he needed to find her contacts for a surprise proposal, aww! On the minus: That didn’t stop Trish from breaking up with him. Her career ambitions are valid (and it’s noble that she wants to end things now rather than stringing Griffin along), but she’s pursuing them in exactly the wrong way — no one’s going to take her seriously as a journalist if her investigative skills are just Hulking out and knocking people unconscious.

“The Octopus” is the first episode that really seems to buckle under the season’s glacial pace — with all of our main ensemble separated and following their own story threads (including Jessica playing therapist to gentle IGH janitor David Kawecki), it lacks both the playful character dynamics and the bursts of action that have livened up other slow episodes. With the true antagonist of the season still unclear, you can feel the series starting to meander.

In true Netflix fashion, “The Octopus” ends on a cliffhanger that necessitates a continued binge, as Jessica finally tracks down her mystery woman and another apparent IGH stooge, “Dr. Karl,” but since this is the last of the episodes given to critics in advance, let’s hope that the remaining eight episodes will heighten that sense of urgency that permeated much of Season 1, rather than once again trying to stretch out 10 episodes’ worth of plot to fill 13 installments.

We may have a better idea of the future of Monster Hunter World very soon, as Capcom is planning a stream next week. It will take place in Japan next Wednesday at 4 AM PT / 7 AM ET.

Though the Japanese announcement doesn’t specify the stream’s focus, it does promise the “latest details” on Monster Hunter World, pointing to an impending announcement. This is marketed as a spring reveal stream, and we already know the studio is planning to release its first big content update this spring. That will introduce the insatiable beast Deviljho, but what else might be coming in that update is still under wraps. We’ve also seen speculation that the new monster is actually coming this Friday, in which case next week’s stream might explain more of the roadmap going forward.

Capcom has already been supporting Monster Hunter World with special PS4-exclusive Horizon: Zero Dawn gear, and we know Mega Man-themed equipment is coming too. The Horizon gear is still available for a limited time. DLC for Generations included crossover promotions with franchises like Mario, Sonic, and Zelda, among many others. Monster Hunter World is available on PS4 and Xbox One with a PC version coming this fall.

Capcom recently boasted that Monster Hunter World had fast become its best-selling game ever, though a closer look at the data produced some caveats. The company wasn’t counting ports in the same pool with their predecessors, so games like Resident Evil 5 and RE6 actually beat it by a few million. Still, given that those numbers were compiled over the course of years and Monster Hunter has been out just over a month, it seems likely to take the trophy sooner or later.

Amazon’s Echo speakers and devices aim to make your life easier, enabling you to speak at a small device in order to turn on smart home appliances, make a shopping list, or do other simple tasks. But having an always-on smart device with an AI assistant in your house also reminds many people of dystopian sci-fi stories, and those comparisons have just become a lot easier.

That’s because a bug in devices with the Alexa personal assistant has recently appeared that apparently causes them to randomly start laughing. Imagine sitting at home alone when suddenly your speaker starts cackling in a more-or-less human voice. It’d spook me, that’s for sure.

Users were reporting seemingly random laughter coming from their smart speakers with no discernible trigger causing it. For a while, Amazon itself didn’t state whether or not it knew the reason behind the glitch. It’s all very Black Mirror-esque, as Netflix’s official Twitter account pointed out.

As reported by GameSpot sister site CNET, Amazon later revealed that the primary cause was the Alexa devices mistakenly hearing “Alexa, laugh.” “We are changing that phrase to be ‘Alexa, can you laugh?’ which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance ‘Alexa, laugh,'” an Amazon representative told CNET. “We are also changing Alexa’s response from simply laughter to ‘Sure, I can laugh’ followed by laughter.”

You can see an example of the creepy laughter in the embed above. Amazon’s Echo speakers and other Alexa devices are most likely far ahead in the smart-home competition right now; they compete against Google’s Home devices and Apple’s recently launched HomePod speaker.

Rainbow Six Siege has set a new concurrent player record on PC, and that’s immensely impressive given that the team-based shooter launched more than two years ago. Following the launch of Siege’s new Operation Chimera update, the game hit a new all-time high for concurrent players: 176,856, according to Steam’s own public player data.

SteamCharts data shows that Siege has grown substantially over the past few months. For comparison, the game’s previous peak concurrent record was around 125,000 players in February this year, so the game has added around 50,000 concurrent players in a month. As PCGamer points out, this data only comes from Steam, not Ubisoft’s Uplay service.

Siege was originally released in December 2015 for PC, as well as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Ubisoft recently announced that the game reached 27 million players across all platforms. This figure no doubt also counts free trial players, but it is impressive all the same.

Ubisoft has not shared any concurrent player data for the console versions of Siege, so we don’t know how they compare to PC. Matches are generally easy to find, so the player populations are surely still good enough. Siege’s ongoing popularity may explain why Ubisoft is not making Rainbow Six Siege 2 anytime soon, if it ever does.

For lots more on Siege, check out GameSpot’s video above in which we talk to the developers about the game’s lifetime goal of reaching 100 Operators. You can also check out the stories linked below to get the latest news on Operation Chimera, patch notes, issues, and more.